Friday, September 7, 2012

Montage # 70 - Hommage à Mozart

As of October 12, 2012, this montage will no longer be available on Pod-O-Matic. It can be heard or downloaded from the Internet Archive at the following address / A compter du `1 octobre 2012, ce montage ne sera plus disponible en baladodiffusion Pod-O-Matic. Il peut être téléchargé ou entendu au site Internet Archive à l'adresse suivante:

I tricked you, didn’t I! It doesn’t happen often that I begin in French and follow-up in English… But
since the post title is in French, I couldn’t resist!

We begin our Mozart and Much More month with a set of
tributes to Mozart by other composers. I have retained three major works in our
montage, the first is one which I personally consider a study in Mozart’s piano
concerto style by a 14 year-oldBeethoven. Some will argue this is not
Beethoven’s best work (rarely the case when you’re a teenager), and the
re-orchestrations by musicologist Willy Hess and the one I retained by our
soloist Ronald Brautigam are probably much better than the original student
orchestration, but the pianistic style and overall mood of the piece would make
it fit right into the last third of the Mozart Concerto set.

In an early OperaLively post, I presented many
works by Franz Liszt that find their
inspiration in Opera – and this virtuoso piece based on airs from Don Giovanni is one of my favourites in
that set.

The TcahikovskyMozartiana suite is a series of Mozart pieces that Tchaikovsky
adapted for orchestra – a pair of small piano pastiches, the Ave Verum Corpus (without the singing)
and the Gluck piano variations. Tchaikovsky stays very close to Mozart’s intentions
– you can hear from yourself when compared to the originals that I inserted in
the above French commentary.

To complete the
montage, works by an artist once called le Mozart
canadien, André Gagnon – so
named because he hired the Montreal Symphony to back him up in a “serious”
concert of Mozart concerti in the mid-60’s. The Sor Introduction and Variations on the Magic Flute is probably his most played work and, finally, the
adagio from Haydn’s 98th
symphony – a tribute to a colleague who (at the time) had recently passed away.